Small is beautiful: A study of ed-tech as if people mattered

British economist E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1972) champions small, appropriate technologies that empower people rather than the prevailing logic of “bigger is better” — a philosophy that continues to dominate the way we imagine national economies and global industries. Higher Education’s online push for the equivalent of “bigger is better” over the last four years in the form of the Massive Open Online Courses has left some questioning the value of massive as it relates to teaching and learning. This presentation will examine the concept of “enoughness” and how re-thinking questions of scale and efficiency may enable us to to imagine ed-tech as if people, not numbers and data, mattered.